Over the years that I have been researching and writing
about Elizabeth Bishop, the one aspect of her life which has most interested me
is her relationship with her mother. Because their actual time together was of
relatively short duration (the first five years of Bishop’s life), most critics
and scholars assume that there was no ongoing relationship at all — which makes
me wonder what sort of relationships these critics and scholars have with their
own mothers. I am no psychologist, so cannot presume to know much if anything
about the organic nature of this relationship (heavens, I’m still working out
my own relationship with my mother, who has been dead over eighteen years); but
on the most basic, practical level, regardless of the length of time we have
with our mothers, the relationship not only endures, but continues to affect
our sense of self and our position vis-Ã -vis the world. Sometimes I’ve wondered
if scholars think that Bishop emerged fully formed from the head of some Vassar
deity in 1934, without any connection to what was, upon investigation, a
complex, fraught, fascinating childhood.
One of the critical habits about this important relationship
of Bishop’s life that has been perpetuated in most of the scholarship is the
often complete erasure of Bishop’s mother, Gertrude May Bulmer Bishop. Many
times, Gertrude is referred to only as “mother,” as if she was some sort of vague
notion, not a flesh-and-blood human being. Bishop certainly did not experience
her mother as a vague notion, even in the long, living absence that occurred
because of her mother’s hospitalization. Much of this erasure of Gertrude is
due to the alleged “objectivity” of academic literary criticism and critics and
their belief that the life must remain removed from the art — to link art to
the life of the artist is a disservice to (even a betrayal of) the art. Bishop
did not separate art from life, nor did she privilege art over life. Just as
with her understanding of the forces of creativity, Bishop believed there was
no “split,” which makes life and art quite messy, “an untidy activity” — even
if one can hold to some enduring truths outside our selves, such as beauty. Of
course, there were times when Bishop believed the opposite of all of this — to
hold too rigidly to one belief paints one into a very small corner.
A major part of my Bishop research has been to locate
information about Gertrude, to piece together a more detailed picture of this
quite real and complex person. Bishop famously “disembodied” her mother in a
sound, “the scream” of “In the Village” — but look carefully at that
masterpiece and her mother is quite embodied through all the senses and in many
dimensions. Bishop even tries to understand her mother’s state of mind,
unsuccessfully perhaps because she was only five when she witnessed the events
of that story.
This portrait of Gertrude Bulmer, around age 7 (circa 1886) was done by an "unknown itinerant portrait painter." It and its companion portrait of Arthur Bulmer were given to Bishop by her aunts in the 1960s. They formed the basis of "Memories of Uncle Neddy." The portraits still exist in the US and in 2010-2011 I tried desperately to find a way to buy and repatriate them, but failed.
For me, Chapter Four of Lifting
Yesterday is the most important chapter in the book, providing the
beginning of a corrective of the general treatment of Gertrude Bulmer Bishop in
Bishop scholarship. This portrait is only a sketch, more detailed than anywhere
else, but still only a sketch. Even so, I hope that I bring a living, breathing
Gertrude more the fore, placing her in the context of her family, community and
time; but even more, showing something of her “selfhood” — the sense of who she
was and why she was unable to hold onto what we would, rightly or wrongly, call
a “normal life.”
Bishop was deeply affected by her parents’ lives, by the
premature death of her father, by the ongoing mental struggle of her mother. I
think Bishop spent her entire life dealing with all this stuff: she sunk under
its burden; she rose above its pain; she channelled her confusion, anger,
frustration and sorrow into her art, transforming the overwhelming emotions
into amazing poems and memoirs. She didn’t let it get to her and she let it
trap her, all at the same time. Whose life is any different, I wonder? Bishop’s
fable “In Prison” declares that we are all in some sort of prison, so the trick
is to find the right one and commit to it, then you might have a chance at
finding some sort of peace of mind. This story is told from a remarkable
clear-eyed, unself-pitying perspective. Bishop was in her twenties when she
wrote it. Who did Bishop know who was “imprisoned”? Her mother.
Nova Scotia Hospital (Mount Hope), the institution where Gertrude spent the last eighteen years of her life.
When Bishop first read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems during
her teens and early twenties, she saw how profound, troubling, overwhelming
emotions could be held and carried in powerful language. One of the reasons I
believe Bishop was able to cope (with varying degrees of success through the
years) with these early first losses was because somehow, for some reason, in
some way, she was able to hear her own “voice” at an early age. Rather than
this reality being in spite of her mother, might it also be, if only in part,
BECAUSE of her mother. Why is one assertion more accurate than the other? As in
the quantum world where light is both a particle and a wave, in our psychic
world there is no either/or, there is only all, and all at once. Bishop knew
how important and futile language was in her exploration and expression of this
all.
Artists are notoriously difficult to understand and each of
us who approaches an artist’s life does so with a bias. One of my biases is
that Bishop’s mother mattered to Bishop, so when I went looking for how and
why, I was primed to interpret evidence that light. I have written about
Bishop’s relationship with her mother a number of times. One of my first
published essays appeared in the spring 1994 issue (Vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 25–50)
of The Dalhousie Review, “Shipwrecks
of the Soul: Elizabeth Bishop’s Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Somehow I
have lost track of my electronic file for this essay and The Dalhousie Review has not yet digitized back issues (though it
declares that is happening).
Some years later, I wrote an essay about Bishop and World
War I, which appeared in
War, Literature
& The Arts (Spring/Summer 1999, Vol. 11, no. 1, 93–110). This journal
is digitized and you can check out this issue at the following link:
http://wlajournal.com/archive.aspx?issue=11_1
Gertrude (r) and Elizabeth (c) and either Mabel Bulmer or Florence Bishop. Sadly, I have lost track of how this image came to me. Bishop looks to be about 2 or 3, so that would put it circa 1913-1914.
However, I have managed to keep track of this file and
if anyone is interested in reading this essay, which is, if I do say so myself,
an interesting look at how the private drama of the Bulmer family (around the
illness and hospitalization of Gertrude) and the drama of global war held
uncanny synchronicities, I can send it to you as a pdf (gratis).
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